An American Son: A Memoir (38 page)

We had cleared another hurdle. After a miserable month of sharp attacks and tough scrutiny, I had performed well in my first debate. In preparing for it, I had been forced to recognize my deficiencies and try to become a better candidate and person. I learned to listen to tough criticism and take it in stride without losing my temper. Our rough campaign was making me a better candidate, and if I won, it would have prepared me to be a better leader. It began to occur to me that God might be using the campaign to make me aware of my weaknesses and more humble because of them.

More important, the trials of the last month had tested whether I really trusted God. All the planning, all the talking points, all the pushback didn’t spare me the humiliation of all those negative stories. We might have blunted them a little here and there, but for the most part they were reported in the most damaging way possible. I was left with no choice but to accept I had no control over their impact.

Would my supporters abandon me? Would donors leave me? Would my poll numbers sink? I didn’t know for certain, but I expected they would. I was suffering a wave of terrible publicity, and there was very little I could do about it. Every day that went by, I worried it would be the day it all fell apart. I felt the way I had in the summer of 2009, essentially powerless to control my own destiny. I tried everything else before I accepted I had no choice but to trust in God. Whatever happened to me would be for my own good.

I had gone toe to toe with Crist for an hour before three million viewers. He had hit me with everything he had, and I was still standing. I might be wrong, but, looking back at the debate, I think the experience convinced Crist to run as an independent. His advisers had assured him that if he attacked me, I would come undone. He did, and I didn’t. There really wasn’t anything else he could do. If the primary was about what I believed it was about—nominating a candidate who would stand up to the president—Crist couldn’t win. I think he knew that. He had become the angry campaigner, not me. I could tell he didn’t like me and resented having to fight me for the nomination. Maybe that had made it easier for him to attack me.
I don’t think he enjoyed it, though. It wasn’t the image of the happy warrior he had cultivated for years.

As March gave way to April, we survived and kept moving forward. The future looked bright. I didn’t know that a stunning turn of events was waiting just around the corner, as was a great personal loss that I would struggle to accept.

L
IFE WAS GETTING HARDER FOR GOVERNOR CRIST. HALFWAY through the legislative session, he was starting to lose his influence. His once immense popularity that he had used to intimidate the legislature had waned, as poll after poll showed him trailing me by twenty points. He was a lame duck, and Republican legislators began to assert themselves, knowing he would be out of the governor’s office next year. They passed a series of conservative bills on issues ranging from merit pay for teachers to property insurance reforms to mandatory ultrasound tests for women seeking an abortion—all these would present a challenge to the governor. If he signed them, the press would conclude he was trying to shore up his appeal to conservative primary voters. If he vetoed them, it would be taken as a sign he was going to run as an independent despite his denials to the contrary.

I was feeling more confident that the worst of the attacks were behind me. I took Easter Sunday off and spent the day with my family at Veronica’s house. I noticed my father was out of breath after he got up from his chair to get a glass of water. I asked him about it, and he admitted he had been experiencing shortness of breath for a while. He had seen the doctor, who suspected bronchitis and prescribed a cough suppressant.

I had an event the next day with Rudy Giuliani, who had decided to endorse me. He was still very popular in Miami, especially among Cuban
Americans. We unveiled his endorsement in Little Havana. I think Rudy believed I was the better candidate, but there was no mistaking he was also intent on settling his unfinished business with Charlie. He never mentioned Charlie by name, but when he told the crowd, “When Marco gives you his word, he keeps it,” everyone knew what he was talking about.

My parents came to the endorsement and got a kick out of meeting Rudy. My dad struggled to catch his breath as he walked from the car to the event. I was increasingly worried about him. He was never one to complain, and he didn’t let on that he wasn’t feeling well. But there was no hiding it. He was plainly in ill health.

The next milepost on the campaign would be our financial report for the first quarter of 2010. Expectations were now reversed. I was assumed to have raised more money than Crist, and Crist’s people were busy inflating expectations in the hope I would fall short of them, which they would attribute to the negative stories about me that had dominated the news in March. I sent an e mail to my supporters on April 7, announcing that we had raised $3.6 million. The figure stunned observers, even those who had believed the Crist campaign’s exaggerations. Most impressively, over 95 percent of my donors hadn’t maxed out their contributions. We now had fifty thousand donors, and almost all of them could still donate more.

If anyone had any doubts that we were in control of the race, they were erased when Crist tried to release his totals quietly on a Friday afternoon, the preferred time for announcing bad news. He had raised $1.1 million. We had outraised him three to one.

Rumors were rampant now that he would leave the Republican Party and run as an independent. He issued another obligatory denial. Then his campaign announced they were spending a million dollars on television ads in Orlando and Tampa. Crist had hoarded his money in past campaigns, waiting for the last few weeks of the election to exploit his advantage. To spend such a sum on ads this early indicated to me that he was planning one last attempt to improve his support with Republican voters before the qualifying date for the Republican primary. If it didn’t work, he would run as an independent. Either way, we weren’t taking any chances. We scheduled a three-day bus tour across the state for the middle of April, around the same time his ads would be on the air. We would kick it off in Orlando.

I had just dropped the kids off at school on the morning of April 12, the
day before the bus tour, when my cell phone rang. It was my father. He was very short of breath, and asked me if I would take him to the hospital. I was shocked. He never admitted to being sick and dismissed every illness as little more than an inconvenience. He had to be very ill and very frightened to ask me to take him to the hospital.

I drove immediately to his house and found him waiting on a bench outside. Fifteen minutes later we were sitting in the waiting room at Baptist Hospital. They ran a battery of tests, and later that afternoon the pulmonologist came into my father’s room and asked to speak with the family. My sisters and I stepped into the hallway, where he delivered the bad news. My dad’s lung cancer had returned, and his emphysema had progressed considerably. There were no surgical options, he told us. He advised us to meet with an oncologist, but in his opinion, considering my father’s age and the advanced stage of his emphysema, chemotherapy wasn’t a good option, either. Barbara and I were still probing him for treatment options, when Veronica asked the question neither of us wanted to ask: “How long does he have?”

“With treatment, maybe eight to twelve months,” he said. “With no treatment, considerably less.”

Just as the news my father wouldn’t survive the year was sinking in, staff called to tell me Crist had just gone on air with a brutal attack ad. He e mailed it to me. In a small waiting room at Baptist Hospital, just minutes after I’d been told my father was terminally ill, I watched a thirty-second spot linking me to my successor as speaker, Ray Sansom, who had been forced to resign from office. The ad captioned the word “indicted” under Sansom’s picture, and “subpoenaed” under mine.

All my life my dad had taken care of me. He had driven me to two hospitals when I had a bad stomachache until he found a doctor who would diagnose my problem. When I had injured my knee playing football, my father went with me every day to rehabilitate it. When I came home rather than stay in Gainesville waiting for my last final exam, he had driven me back to school and sat for hours in a Burger King waiting for me to finish my exam. Even when I was grown and married, my dad took me to the hospital when I suffered from stomach flu on Easter Sunday in 1999. He had always been there for me—always—and had never asked for anything from the rest of us. I wanted to be there for him.

We decided to go ahead with the first part of the bus trip, but
announced that my father’s cancer had returned and we had to cut the trip short so I could make arrangements for his care. I did an interview with Sean Hannity on the evening of April 13, from The Villages in north-central Florida. At the end of the interview I asked Sean if I could say hello to my dad in Miami. I knew he was watching. He always was.

I returned to Miami and cleared my calendar for the next few days. We had him discharged from the hospital and moved him to Barbara’s house, which was just a few blocks from my house. I spent much of the first day making certain he had oxygen there. The next day, I took him to get a PET scan to determine whether his cancer had spread. It hadn’t, and his oncologist thought it was worth a shot to see if he could tolerate chemotherapy. My sisters believed that, given his age and emphysema, chemotherapy would only debilitate him more rapidly and make his last few months of life unbearable. But, like me, they couldn’t accept the idea of letting his cancer grow if there was a chance we could arrest it. I pushed for the chemo, and my dad consented.

I drove him to his first chemo treatment and got him situated in the chair where he would receive the chemo over the next several hours, leaving him with a portable radio tuned to a baseball game and a sandwich from Subway. I went home reflecting on the end of the cycle of life, when the child takes care of the parent.

Encouraging my father to undergo chemotherapy proved to be a terrible mistake. He didn’t respond well to it. He lost a lot of weight and all his hair. He stopped after three treatments. I had made a very bad call, and my dad had suffered for it.

It took me a while to get back into a frame of mind to continue the campaign. My heart wasn’t in it. I knew my father wanted to see me win. Even in his suffering, he watched Fox News all day long, waiting for news about my campaign. Back I went, into the thick of it, and soon the campaign’s rhythm, its highs and lows, the good and the bad news, began to preoccupy me again.

On April 15, Quinnipiac released another poll that gave me a huge lead. By now, another poll with me ahead wasn’t really news. But this poll got my attention because it also found that, were Crist to run as an independent, he would have a narrow lead. As soon as I saw it, I knew it would get Charlie’s attention, too.

Until then, we had asked ourselves whether Crist would leave the Republican Party to become an independent. But that was the wrong question. In Florida, you can retain your party affiliation and still run in a general election under the designation of “no party affiliation.” In other words, Crist didn’t have to leave the GOP to run in a three-way race in the fall. He just had to qualify as a “no party” candidate by filling out the appropriate paperwork and paying the filing fee.

No one had asked Crist that question. So one of my consultants, Alberto Martinez, pitched it to several reporters.
Miami Herald
reporter Marc Caputo asked Crist on April 15, “Will you withdraw from the Republican primary?” Crist responded, “That’s the last thing on my mind right now.” It was an obvious evasion. By now, we all knew that was exactly what he was considering.

Just as he had done a year earlier when he had dragged out his decision to run for the Senate, Crist again became the constant object of speculation about his intentions. Whether or not he would run as an independent was the hottest political question in the news. Suddenly, he wasn’t the struggling former front-runner in the GOP primary anymore. He had once again become Charlie Crist, man of intrigue. He milked it for all it was worth, and then fate gave him the perfect issue to potentially change the direction of the race.

Republicans in the Florida legislature had worked the entire session on a bill instituting teacher tenure and merit pay—the reforms that conservatives love and teachers’ unions hate. The debate had become very heated. The teachers’ unions used social media and protest rallies to build opposition to the legislation. It was an impressive, well-executed, grassroots effort that caught the bill’s supporters off guard. The legislature passed it anyway, and sent it to the governor. He could either sign it and please conservatives who had deserted him for me, or he could veto it and please the teachers’ unions, many parents and a growing number of voters who had rallied to the teachers’ unions’ side. I never had any doubt which course he would choose.